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I don’t like to review individual films on Celluloid Jungle, but I really have to vent my frustration about one film in particular: The Shawshank Redemption (1994). It lacks imagination. many of its characters are two-dimensional and its story is predictable.It has some good dramatic moments, but instead of contributing to the protagonists' journey in a congruous way they're mostly there to pass the time, which for the audience would otherwise be as excruciatingly boring as it is for the inmates of the prison.
The film presents a good way to waste an afternoon, but it doesn't leave you thinking about the world, or yourself, in a different way. Man shouldn't be in prison, is mistreated, gets out of prison... Whoopie-f*cking-hoo.I don't actually hate the film. I just hate the way that it has made its way to the top of IMDb and some magazines' top 100 lists. It astounds me that anyone can find so little in the rich tapestry of life that they consider The Shawshank Redemption to be cinema at its very finest. Its success must be due to the film's values failing to offend anyone much: it's numero uno one due to a consensus of indifference.In the film’s defence, Morgan Freeman’s performance is excellent, and the script – despite being pedestrian -- is a million miles from The Green Mile, another Stephen King-penned prison flick, whose characters are even more two-dimensional, whose plot drags on for an eternity without any direction, and which asks the audience to believe in a mouse that lives forever while at the same time denying children the chance to enjoy the spectacle by including Tom Hanks’ diseased genitals as another key plot point.Regardless of this, it is wrong that Shawshank survives recency bias and 13 years on is second only to The Godfather in IMDb users’ estimation. Murder in the First (1995) tells a very similar story, and does so with more finesse, but relatively few people have ever heard of it… Maybe Shawshank is ‘a classic’ just because enough people have said so in magazines and culture supplements and enough part-time filmgoers failed to disagree.
I just cancelled my subscription to Empire magazine. Here is the email that I sent them:
Hi Empire
I have been an Empire reader since 1995 and subscriber since 1997. But today I cancelled my direct debit.
My reasons:
- You blur the lines between reviews and paid-for advertorials. It's difficult to know what sentiments are your own and what sentiments are included because they complement your advertisers' branding.
- You want to be the world's biggest movie mag so badly that more editorial space is given to films that people want to read than films that are actually worth seeing. It's fine, of course, that you give your customers what they want, but your nine-page Fantastic Four features and multi-issue War of the Worlds extravaganzas compromise your credibility and isolate many of your readers.
- You fancy yourself. Some of your writers are exceptionally good, but it troubles me that you write about them so often, and that you invent a reality TV-style competition where the ultimate reward is to join their hallowed ranks. I buy Empire to read about creative talent in the film industry, not to read about creative talent in journalism.
- You tried to make Empire an interactive community-type thing, inviting and publishing readers' views for features like DVD Club. If you're unfamiliar with a director's work, hire some writers who know what they're talking about. Don't just tell us what we've told you -- why would we want to pay for that?
Best of luck for the future. I hope the Lord of the Rings nerds keep your magazine running for many years to come.
Kind regards
Robert Hayward
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